Article Originally Posted on bizjournals.com.
A historic designation would upend any development plans — but it’s not the only hurdle.
By Sara Gilgore – Staff Reporter, Washington Business Journal
Oct 29, 2025
Updated Oct 30, 2025 9:33am EDT
- Montgomery County recommends against historic designation for Comsat building.
- Clarksburg Gateway Sector Plan envisions mixed-use community on 969 acres.
- Rehabilitating Comsat building would cost $94 million, deemed unfeasible.
The Montgomery County Planning Board has recommended against historic designation for the Comsat Laboratories building, a 56-year-old César Pelli-designed research facility in Clarksburg, potentially removing a big obstacle to a new plan for the area.
Debate now turns to what the 200-acre property at 22300 Comsat Drive should become once the building is razed.
“After nearly 20 years of vacancy and repeated efforts to repurpose the site, the Comsat campus in Clarksburg is approaching a turning point,” said Bob Elliott, CEO of River Falls Investments LLC, which owns the campus. “But new challenges are surfacing just as the historic preservation debate nears resolution.”
Elliott agrees that upper Montgomery County “urgently needs” housing and retail, but has raised concern about the potential costs and timelines associated with what county planners are pushing for: a dense and compact town center akin to Rockville’s Pike & Rose or Gaithersburg’s Rio blending uses.
The Comsat historic designation debate
The 500,000-square-foot Comsat building, surrounded by fields and forests, was home to Communications Satellite Corp.’s research and development arm for decades. The telecommunications company sold the building in 1997 and continued to lease it before vacating. Lantian Development LLC, formerly a China-backed company, bought the campus in 2015. It reorganized in 2024 as an American company and changed its name to River Falls.
The county started to explore historic designation for the building as part of its plan to update the Clarksburg Gateway Sector Plan, which covers a 969-acre area east of I-270 and north of Germantown.
The Comsat site has remained a symbol of modern architecture and the earliest iterations of the county’s technology corridor. But the building, the size of a mall, doesn’t lend itself to a typical conversion into a school, apartments, church or a restaurant. And the pool of potential equity partners is also too small to make it feasible, said Rebeccah Ballo, chief of the county’s Historic Preservation Division.
Her team, which worked with urban design specialists and economic development consultants in their evaluation, found the project would be “way too cost prohibitive” even with historic preservation tax credits and other incentives, she told me.
While the building is architecturally and historically important and the county’s Historic Preservation Commission — which her office staffs — recommended designation in January, she said, historic designation would prohibit redevelopment of the site.
“The cost of adaptively re-using the building and rehabilitating it would be so large, so great a cost burden, that it could effectively prevent redevelopment from being realized on this site,” she said.
Estimates using 2024 numbers — before any 2025 tariffs — pegged the cost to rehabilitate the Comsat building at about $94 million, according to Ballo. Redevelopment scenarios all resulted in a financing gap of about $28 million, she said.
Recommending against historic designation is not a typical outcome in Montgomery County, which has had a historic preservation master plan since 1979, Ballo said. “This is a unique case.”
“We wish it could’ve been different,” she added. “We really, thoroughly looked at all of the options to see if we could make this viable, and came up, unfortunately, with none.”
With the Clarksburg Gateway Sector Plan, Montgomery County planners are setting out to reimagine an existing 30,000-resident community where development has “largely stalled,” said Patrick Butler, chief of Montgomery County’s Upcounty Planning Division, which is leading the sector plan process.
The plan would update a 1994 framework that “anticipated several million square feet of development that has not come to fruition,” Butler said.
“If we do nothing, we think there’s a very strong indication we’re going to continue to see nothing,” he said.
The draft plan envisions capacity for 4,000 more residential units across a mix of housing types; the area currently has about 1,100 housing units, mostly single-family homes. It also calls for improving the road network, adding infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists, and introducing a regional transit service, according to the Planning Board’s July public hearing documents.
But, Elliott said, “as Montgomery County confronts a housing shortage and residents in Clarksburg continue to lack retail and services, the key question is whether planners can provide recommendations that enable these needs to be met in the near term rather than shifting expectations and delaying progress.”
Planners want the proposal to better align Clarksburg with the county’s recently adopted comprehensive plan by making zoning more flexible and bringing amenities, open spaces and parks to the area, according to Butler. Senior living is among the concepts floated.
The Comsat site is vital to that vision. The plan describes the property as “one of the last remaining large, undeveloped sites” along Montgomery County’s I-270 corridor that “could attract a major institutional or commercial tenant(s), such as a life sciences company, research and development facility, or corporate headquarters.”
The new Clarksburg debate
The county wants the Comsat site to feature a mixed-use activity center “with a variety of residential, commercial, retail, and recreational uses,” according to the draft plan. It does not outline the potential number of residential units or square feet envisioned for the campus.
But Elliott sees the recommendation for a dense activity center similar to those that have popped up throughout Greater Washington’s inner core as an obstacle.
“This type of urban-scale development is not financially feasible at what is fundamentally a suburban, and in many respects exurban, location,” Elliott said, noting that the cost of the necessary structured parking in this market is “prohibitively expensive.”
“While we share the appeal of creating a vibrant, walkable town center,” he said, “the scale, design, and infrastructure must reflect market realities to ensure the project’s long-term viability and we must plan for incremental market-driven development.”
He also raises concern about the planning staff’s recommendation to eliminate a proposal to build an interchange at I-270 and Little Seneca Parkway near the campus, calling it critical to employment or retail uses on the campus.
“Without an interchange, the burden on local roads could undercut the very community benefits the plan envisions,” he said.
He said his team is “optimistic” it will be included and should have more clarity after a Nov. 20 work session.
Planning department officials say they have been working with the property owner and community stakeholders throughout the process, and that staff has tried to develop recommendations “that are feasible and beneficial for the community.”
The sector plan, including the recommendation against historic designation for the Comsat building, is expected to head to a Planning Board vote by the end of the year, Butler said, before moving to the County Council.
